What Happened
November Cumulative Update
It’s been a wild, long ride for the team. Kind of similar to the flow of the game itself, it was surreal and shocking, but we made it to release and beyond.
We have spent months after release working day and night to address the issues of the community, and we’ve done a tremendous amount of work adding free content and polishing what we already had.
It feels like a good spot in time to look back at what we’ve done since release, and a good spot in time to thank every single one of our players and our community who gave us the courage and hope to keep going and make our game.
You’ve been with us through thick and thin, and put your faith in us, helped us improve the game and get the message of the game across more than we could ever hope for.
Since release, we have drastically changed the game in every aspect possible, and we have learned a lot.
The first issue we addressed was the motion sickness some of our players were experiencing.
Now we all knew that making a Psychedelic experience into a video game was a towering task, but we were determined to do it anyways. We also knew that going through an acid trip while not actually being on acid might cause some… “Inconsistencies” between the players’s reality and the in-game experience.
What we were not expecting was how much a real psychedelic experience differed from a person’s normal visual patterns and how seeing the same things through a sober eye can cause actual, physical pain to the watcher. Bummer, man.
We either had to recommend to our players to use psychedelic drugs before playing the game, or actually make the game playable while not under the effect. We obviously had to choose the latter.
Then rose the monumental task of preserving the insanity and the corrosive acid experience while making sure our sober players could actually enjoy the game without experiencing various degrees of motion sickness.
And we did it.
A month later, everyone could experience an actual acid trip without needing to use some themselves or suffer motion sickness. We had struck the balance.
The next thing to tackle was the actual game experience itself.
After listening to the feedback from our community, we set about editing every. Single. Second. Of the game. We calculated every moment, rethinked every cinematic, every dialogue, to make sure we delivered the best story-driven experience possible.
We tweaked waiting times, tweaked puzzle difficulties, added and removed hints, added scenes, removed scenes, changed camera directions, etc.
When we were confident that the flow of the game was to our player’s liking, we worked on adding new content.
And we did it.
Hundreds of hours of ceaseless work later, we had a dozen new achievements, minutes of new cinematics, several new endings, new dialogues, new gameplay bits, new puzzles, and even a new bossfight.
We tore the game apart, added dozens of player choices where there was none before, we changed the direction of the story and allowed the player much greater control over the outcome of the game. In practice, a linear story was now a responsive story that shaped up to the ending based on the smallest decision you made.
We added secret endings and easter eggs, we added new alternatives, we added more content and we added more videos. We did our best, and it worked.
And now, on this day, 9th of November, 2020, in the smoldering heat of the U.S Elections, we bring you a brand new What Happened, and we hope you have a nice trip!
10/29/2020, Spooktober Update 💀
First of all I wanted to thank all of you who supported and encouraged us along the way. If it wasn’t for your kind words and passion for our game we would have seen no reason to continue. You keep us going, and on behalf of the team, we thank you for it.
We are glad to be back. We spent the last months since release collecting feedback from both our players and the critics, and we’ve been busy with a massive update that sought to improve the game. We were hard at work improving the gameplay experience based on your initial and continued feedback and interest in the game and we have finally brought you the results.
What we got for you is Legion, and it’s free. We have added a plethora of content to the base game and beyond, and we are excited to let you guys try it.
Listening to the feedback regarding player agency in the game and how it affects the ending, we’ve added multiple choices on different occasions that were previously linearly dictated.
Adding to that, we have added new endings to the game, fully cinematic and beautifully illustrated as you’d expect from the rest of the game.
We’ve added more secret endings too, for those keen enough to find them.
We’ve added more achievements in parallel with the new content for those completionists among you.
Hell, we even added a boss fight.
We can’t really spoil too much in this text, so it’s up to you to go out and explore the new stuff we made for you.
So long as we see our community interested in our game, we will keep creating free content like this for the base game, and we hope to curtail some of the shortcomings we had at release as we go on.
Speaking of which, the Halloween update is also here. There wouldn’t be any better season for players to return to the game than spooktober really. In the spirit of Halloween, we added some thematic content to the game. Expect creepy pumpkins.
Have fun everyone, and stay safe!
Update, 8/4/2020
We are back with yet another update, the result of us working tirelessly day and night and taking each of you into consideration. This update will address most of the issues our community had with the game, and will hopefully result in a more enjoyable experience without watering down the game.
-To start, we have done a massive polish of the game’s every aspect. We have cleaned up every level, fixed every bug we found and optimised whatever we could. We have, more importantly, provided a ton of hints and guides to the levels which the players got frustrated and had no idea about what to do. We have shifted and manipulated the environment in a way that will allow the explorers to explore and the casual players to progress with ease.
-Moreover, we have reduced the amount of waiting and dragging the player around throughout the game by approximately 1 hour. Although this was meant to represent the loneliness and the loss that Stiles’ experienced, along with his inability to act due to drug abuse, we could see why some of our players got frustrated through the dragged-out scenes.
-We have also added the option to skip cut-scenes and cinematics for our players, allowing second play throughs to be much faster and much easier.
-And finally, we have made it easier for our players to achieve the good ending of the game. We have given the feedback thought, and we realised the conditions to achieve the good ending could be a bit more lax, since the players really exerted themselves over it.
We hope this update will help new players and those not particularly patient to go through the game, while maintaining the game’s integrity for those who wish to explore every corner of the game.
We are looking forward to your feedback, and thank you for giving us your time!